From the Microsoft Live Labs comes a new and ambitious experiment called Pivot. It allows a user to browse huge lists of items in a powerful, informative and fun way. Pivot strives to deliver an experience of easily jumping from macro- to microview and back. Visually speaking we can scan through thousends of items in one moment and the next moment examinie a tiny detail of one item.

Starting point

When we use the Web today we treat the most fundamental scenarios as separate activities. Search takes us from many things to one, browsing moves us from one thing to another, and recommendations expose affinities that enable us to explore related topics. Can we do better by combining these scenarios into a more unified experience?

Collections

Items are combined into groups called Collections.These are the builing-blocks of the Pivot interaction and visualization model. The collections reveal hidden patterns to the user and thus allows to discover new insights about the relationships, similarities and dependencies.

Pivot is based on the Seadragon technology and currently available by invitation to a small technical audience. The product website holds more information about the technical side of the application.